ANTLR, Another Tool for Language Recognition, is a language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages.

Programmers usually use parser generators to build translators and interpreters for domain-specific languages such as proprietary data formats, common network protocols, text processing languages, and domain-specific programming languages.

Domain-specific languages are important to software development because they represent a more natural, high fidelity, robust, and maintainable means of encoding a problem than simply writing software in a general-purpose language. For example, NASA uses domain-specific command languages for space missions to improve reliability, reduce risk, reduce cost, and increase the speed of development. Even the first Apollo guidance control computer from the 1960s used a domain-specific language that supported vector computations.

This article will explain the main ANTLR components and explains how they all fit together.

A translator maps each input sentence of a language to an output sentence. To perform the mapping, the translator executes some code you provide that operates on the input symbols and emits some output. A translator must perform different actions for different sentences, which means it must be able to recognize the various sentences.

Recognition is much easier if you break it into two similar but distinct tasks or phases. The separate phases mirror how your brain reads English text. You don’t read a sentence character by character. Instead, you perceive a sentence as a stream of words. The human brain subconsciously groups character sequences into words and looks them up in a dictionary before recognizing grammatical structure. The first translation phase is called lexical analysis and operates on the incoming character stream. The second phase is called parsing and operates on a stream of vocabulary symbols, called tokens, emanating from the lexical analyzer. ANTLR automatically generates the lexical analyzer and parser for you by analyzing the grammar you provide.

Performing a translation often means just embedding actions (code) within the grammar. ANTLR executes an action according to its position within the grammar. In this way, you can execute different code for different phrases (sentence fragments). For example, an action within, say, an expression rule is executed only when the parser is recognizing an expression. Some translations should be broken down into even more phases. Often the translation requires multiple passes, and in other cases, the translation is just a heck of a lot easier to code in multiple phases. Rather than reparse the input characters for each phase, it is more convenient to construct an intermediate form to pass between phases.

This intermediate form is usually a tree data structure, called an abstract syntax tree (AST), and is a highly processed, condensed version of the input. Each phase collects more information or performs more computations. A final phase, called the emitter, ultimately emits output using all the data structures and computations from previous phases.

Figure 1 illustrates the basic data flow of a translator that accepts characters and emits output. The lexical analyzer, or lexer, breaks up the input stream into tokens. The parser feeds off this token stream and tries to recognize the sentence structure. The simplest translators execute actions that immediately emit output, bypassing any further phases.

Another kind of simple translator just constructs an internal data structure, it doesn’t actually emit output. A configuration file reader is the best example of this kind of translator. More complicated translators use the parser only to construct ASTs. Multiple tree parsers (depthfirst tree walkers) then scramble over the ASTs, computing other data structures and information needed by future phases. Although it is not shown in this figure, the final emitter phase can use templates to generate structured text output.

A template is just a text document with holes in it that an emitter can fill with values. These holes can also be expressions that operate on the incoming data values. ANTLR formally integrates the StringTemplate engine to make it easier for you to build emitters. StringTemplate is a domain-specific language for generating structured text from internal data structures that has the flavor of an output grammar. Features include template group inheritance, template polymorphism, lazy evaluation, recursion, output autoindentation, and the new notions of group interfaces and template regions.2 StringTemplate’s feature set is driven by solving real problems encountered in complicated systems. Indeed, ANTLR makes heavy use of StringTemplate to translate grammars to executable recognizers. Each ANTLR language target is purely a set of templates and fed by ANTLR’s internal retargetable code generator.

For a more details on antlr visit the links in the references.

References:

The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages by Terence Parr